Free Republic

A consortium of television networks yesterday released a joint statement inviting President Joe Biden and his presumptive opponent, Donald Trump, to debate on their platforms: “There is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of our nation.” President Biden’s spokesperson should answer like this: “The Constitution is not debatable. The president does not participate in forums with a person under criminal indictment for his attempt to overthrow the Constitution.” In their letter of invitation, the networks refer to presidential debates as a “competition of ideas.” But one...

An old journalism axiom says that if everyone’s mad at you, you must be doing something right. Since NBC announced that it had hired Ronna McDaniel, the recently deposed chair of the Republican National Committee, as a paid contributor, everyone’s been mad. NBC executives are sure to be consoling themselves that they’re doing something right. It’s just hard to see what.

Imagine being not yet seventy years old and being told, not exactly politely, that in the interest of liberalism you have to be put out to pasture. When that message went out to Justice Stephen Breyer in 2021, he was at least over eighty when the leftists told him his time was up on the Supreme Court. With Justice Sonia Sotomayor, despite being over ten years younger than Breyer when he retired, Josh Barro writing for The Atlantic announced that it was time for her to withdraw in the interest of liberalism as you can see in "Sonia Sotomayor Should...

Documentary filmmaker and activist Michael Moore argued that Israel should be less concerned with their Palestinian neighbors and instead view White Christians as their true enemy. Many voters in Michigan, particularly Muslim and Arab-Americans, have called on President Biden to establish an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war. One hundred thousand people from those communities and others marked the "uncommitted" box on their ballots during the Michigan primary, as a warning to Biden that they may stay home on Election Day if he continues his current stance on Israel.

Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel. Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six...

SNIP But even in the shadow of this triumph, a more specific crisis in vaccine acceptance has emerged. Americans aren’t now suspicious of inoculations on the whole—the nation isn’t anti-vax—but we have lost faith in yearly COVID shots. Barely any children have been getting them. Among adults, the drop in uptake has been rapid and relentless: By the spring of 2022, 56 percent of all adults had received their initial booster shot; a year later, just 28 percent were up to date; so far this COVID season, just 19 percent can say the same.

One of the stranger political crusades of the past few years has been the Republican war on so-called woke capital, which has led GOP politicians across the country to adopt a kind of anti-corporate, pro-regulatory rhetoric that one normally associates with the left wing of the Democratic Party. And among the GOP’s favorite targets in this war has been ESG investing—investment funds that take “environmental, social, and governance” considerations into account. For Republicans, ESG funds are a Trojan horse, designed to smuggle progressive attitudes toward climate change, and diversity and inclusion, into executive suites and corporate boardrooms, all under the...

United States Chamber of Commerce CEO Suzanne Clark made a veiled attack against former President Donald Trump’s economic nationalist agenda, declaring that tariffs and reshoring America’s manufacturing base threaten the global economy.During Clark’s annual speech to big business late last week, the Chamber executive said Americans must embrace globalization and free trade rather than seek to reshore American jobs that have been lost to China and other foreign countries over the last three decades.Alone, the U.S. trade deficit with China since 2001 has eliminated nearly four million American jobs. Almost three million of these lost jobs, or about 75 percent,...

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.After four years of Joe Biden, China’s leaders would likely be relieved to have Donald Trump back in the White House.

The leftist Atlantic actually victim-blamed Americans for the crushing high prices they’re experiencing. In the same breath, the outlet billed President Joe Biden’s ridiculously bad economy as the cat’s pajamas. If “everyone is miserable,” how could things be “going great”? CBS News reported based on analysis by the Joint Economic Committee Republicans that Americans need an extra $11,400 today “just to afford the basics.” CNBC also recently analyzed that the increases in consumer expenditures constitute “doom spending” as a coping mechanism to deal with the increasingly insurmountable high cost of living, even if it is detrimental to them. But Lowrey...

This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government. The right-wing legal movement’s target is the “administrative state”—the agencies and institutions that set standards for safety in the workplace, limit environmental hazards and damage, and impose rules on financial markets to ensure their stability and basic fairness, among many other important things. The case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, threatens all of that. Terrifyingly, this gambit might succeed. snip Were Jarkesy to win, he would help achieve what the conservative legal movement’s members have...

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who previously supported former President Trump, said the Trump administration was “crazier” and “more dangerous” than he expected, in a recent interview. Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, has been a vocal supporter and financial advocate for Trump. In an interview with The Atlantic published Thursday, Thiel said he is not giving money to the former president — or any other candidate — in the 2024 presidential campaign.

wasn’t clear at first why Peter Thiel agreed to talk to me. He is, famously, no friend of the media. But Thiel—co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, avatar of techno-libertarianism, bogeyman of the left—consented to a series of long interviews at his home and office in Los Angeles. He was more open than I expected him to be, and he had a lot to say. But the impetus for these conversations? He wanted me to publish a promise he was going to make, so that he would not be tempted to go back on his word. And what was that thing...

Accusing people of “shouting ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater” isn’t sufficient grounds for regulating what they say. Even people who know about the First Amendment still have trouble believing that someone can make false, irresponsible, even dangerous statements without paying any penalty. For instance, when Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, spoke with National Public Radio to promote COVID vaccinations and boosters just before Thanksgiving, he sharply criticized people who intentionally spread misinformation about the vaccine’s safety. “Isn’t this like yelling fire in a crowded theater?” he asked. “Are you really allowed to do that without...

The few remaining viewers of CNN got a remarkable dose of news on Saturday. Just in time for Constitution Day, CNN’s dwindling audience learned that the Consitution of the United States — the oldest written government charter in the world and the document that gave birth to the nation that has spread democracy around the globe — has become so “outdated” that it’s actually a “threat to democracy.” Of course, that’s democracy as CNN’s scholars understand it. And you can’t spell ignorance without “C-N-N.” The word came on “Newsroom,” anchored by former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta. Acosta interviewed...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol played out for the world to see, but the House committee investigating the attack believes a more chilling story has yet to be told -- about the president and the people whose actions put American democracy at risk. With personal accounts and gruesome videos the 1/6 committee expects Thursday’s prime-time hearing to begin to show that America’s tradition of a peaceful transfer of presidential power came close to slipping away. It will reconstruct how the president, Donald Trump, refused to concede the 2020 election, spread false claims of...

In 1968, Pauline Kael, then The New Yorker's film critic, has famously been quoted as saying, "I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” The actual quote might actually have been a bit different, but the point remains: liberal elitists live in an echo chamber of their own ideas. On Monday, Phil Mattingly (recently named Kaitlin Collins' permanent replacement as a co-host of CNN This Morning) seemed to have his own Pauline Kael moment. Mattingly was commenting on a recent column by CNN analyst Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic entitled "Why Biden Just Can't Shake...

The Greek myth of Medusa takes many forms, but the most common is this: Medusa was a woman who, having angered the goddess Athena, was made into a monster. Athena punished Medusa by turning her hair into a writhing tangle of serpents, and then by ensuring that anyone who looked into Medusa’s eyes would be turned to stone. In shaping their story of a gaze made violent, the creators of that early democracy were prescient about the man who has tried to destroy ours. Donald Trump’s head may be covered in spray rather than snakes, but he is a Medusa...

Apparently attempting to promote free speech on a Big Tech platform is now “right wing.” At least, that’s what The Atlantic is suggesting in its latest conniption over Twitter 2.0 under owner Elon Musk. Atlantic Staff Writer Charlie Warzel bemoaned in his whiny May 23 piece how “Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network.” Warzel — apparently disturbed that Twitter 2.0 isn’t the Orwellian censorship cesspool it once was — laced his headline with nutty agitprop: “Twitter Is...

People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting. All her life, Victoria Rutledge thought of herself as someone with an addictive personality. Her first addiction was alcohol. After she got sober in her early 30s, she replaced drinking with food and shopping, which she thought about constantly. She would spend $500 on organic groceries, only to have them go bad in her fridge. “I couldn’t stop from going to that extreme,” she told me. When she ran errands at Target, she would impulsively throw extra things—candles, makeup, skin-care products—into her...